the hypothetical wren

I am not dead, or have I forgotten about the blog. School started this week, and I’ve been slammed with things to do for almost two weeks now, and my schedule keeps changing, among other irritants. Hopefully, I’ll have time to update here in a few days, after I finish a bunch of reading and write up a paper proposal for a conference. In the meantime, enjoy this essay on Dutch bike culture [1], several awesome pairs of shoes, and the above photo of the lunch I packed on the first day of school (similar ones have come to school with me each day since, including today).

[1] I saw a red Dutch-style bike on campus yesterday (the red on on this page, basically), and I took a picture of it, since it was so awesome. I was telling M. about it, with its skirt guard and its rear wheel lock, and she looked at me, and said, “Congratulations! You’re now officially a Bike Asshole!” I told her she should make me a certificate to celebrate this….

Even though this has been, overall, a crap-ass summer, there have been some great days in it. The day I spent in Ouray in with my dad a few weeks ago was one of them, and today was another, filled with lots of activity, and, most importantly, lots of bike time.

I had to get up fairly early today, since I needed to take M. to the airport. I could have gotten up earlier, but M. is not of the same school of the thought re: getting to the airport that I am. She can calmly waltz up to the gate while the final boarding call is being issued, while I have to nervously position myself close to the gate at least an hour before we all have to get on board. The good part here is that I got to sleep in a bit more; the bad part was that I spent part of my early morning being nervous for someone else’s flight.

Since I was up, I figured I might as well go for a bike ride. I didn’t want to go out on the trails, since I have plans to do that tomorrow. I was sort of tired, too, of taking my bike to places it’s been before. I wanted to go somewhere new, or, at least new to me via bike.

The big mental/geographical boundary for bike riding has, up to today, has been west. West towards downtown, west towards Old Town and beyond. I’ve driven to the Bosque trail each time I’ve been there, so the spaces between there and my apartment were unknown biking territory. My big worries were crossing under the interstate, and then crossing the railyards into downtown (via a steep road overpass) — especially considering that, for me, the most convenient route would be via Lead Avenue. Not a street that caters to the slow, the em-biked, or the on-footed. Then, there was the problem of getting back up ABQ’s one giant hill on route to home.

None of these turned out to be big problems, in retrospect. I biked from my apartment to The Grove for a tasty pancake breakfast (pictured above, before the impending devourment), and then rode around the surrounding neighborhood for a bit before heading downtown. I did walk my bike over the Lead overpass, because I wanted to use the protected walkway instead of being in with the traffic. After that, though, I rode from place to place, happily.

Saturday was a day of two festivals — one I intended to go to, one that I just ended up at. The first was the We Art the People Folk Festival in Robinson Park. This is my favorite ABQ art festival — I’ve been to it all three Augusts that I’ve lived here. It’s mellow, the art is usually interesting and affordable, and I usually run into a lot of people that I know or at least recognize there. This weekend, for example, I saw many of the other people that go to Winnings a lot, some of whom I know the names of, some of whom I do not. Nevertheless, we recognized one another.

I saw a lot of things for sale at the festival that I liked, such as vinyl tote bags with turkey legs or corn dogs on them and tiny photos of sock monkeys beating each other up. The best thing I saw were a collection of “Albuquerque Action Figures,” small clay representations of notorious local figures such as Naked Don or this guy. Unfortunately, they sold pretty fast, and I didn’t get a chance to pick one of them up. I did get two pieces of jewelry, though:

I’m wearing the “explore” necklace right now. The silver spiral pendant is a bit big for the chains I have — I’m going to have to think about how best to wear it. Neither piece was particularly expensive — both, combined, came to about $35.

More importantly, though, I had a good time just walking around and looking at pieces, and occasionally talking to the artists. I had to walk my bike around with me, since all of the good or even the crappy bike parking was already taken.

Some observations:

• I don’t know if I’m getting less introverted than I used to be, but I found talking to people at the festival to be pretty easy (particularly those whose work I was interested in). This may seem like a small thing, but it’s about 180 degrees away from the way I usually act in such situations. Maybe it was because I was in a good mood or something.
• Looking around at the work at the festival, it was hard for me not to think, hey, I could do this. I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense, the way some people argue, when exposed to certain types of art, “My six-year-old can do this!” Rather, this reflects the fact that I’ve been thinking more seriously about the photos I take, about being at least somewhat of an artist in addition to being an academic. I’ve become better at thinking about what it is that I like and don’t like in my own work, and that of others. I feel much more creative than I have in a long time, thanks in part to all of the pictures I’ve taken for this blog, and I’m trying to think of ways to get better as a photographer (and, hopefully, as a writer, both here and in my other work).

After I saw what I came to see at the folk festival, I decided to ride around some more. I rode down Mountain, to look at some of the new businesses that have opened up there, and then I finally found myself in Old Town, where there was another festival, the Salsa Festival, going on. This one is pretty self explanatory — there are lots of salsa samples to try, which attracts a lot of tourists. I heard more German accents in the hour or so I was in the area than I’ve heard in a long time (Germans seem to love the Southwest, for some reason). There was free food (chips and salsa), free bottles of cold water (yet, no recycling), and free entertainment, so I stayed for a while, watching people mill around, taking pictures of people taking pictures of buildings, and other cheap entertainments.

I rode back towards downtown, taking detours on many side streets, and, in the end, decided I was too tired (we’re talking about four or five hours of exploration, in all) to try riding or even walking my bike back up The Hill. This, in turn, prompted yet another biking milestone for me and the Townie: successfully putting the bike on a bus bike rack. I’d been nervous about doing this, since my bike is a few inches longer than most bikes, due to the geometry of its frame. I’d read more than a few comments on the Internet about such bikes being unable to fit in various bike racks and bike holders, and the last thing I wanted was to put my bike in a bus rack and then have it come off, spectacularly and destructively, as the bus made a wiiiiiide turn onto some other street. After receiving reassurances that bikes like mine had been seen on buses around town, I was less worried, but it wasn’t until this weekend that I had a chance to try it out. Anyway, it fits, at least on one bus bike rack out there.

This weekend, was, more or less, my one-month bike-a-iversary. I’ve ridden my bike almost every day since I bought it, and I can’t think of a purchase that has brought me quite so much enjoyment in such a short time. Considering the things I like to do for fun, it now amazes me that I didn’t think of buying a bike long before this. The one downside that I can see (other than moving it around my apartment) is that I’ve gone to the gym a lot less in the last month (although, I’m probably getting the same amount of exercise). It’s little wonder, though: biking=fun, gym=hamster wheel.

(The first photo was actually taken in Santa Fe on Wednesday. Some unknown passerby decided to enhance one of the Museum of New Mexico posters near the Plaza using a Sharpie.)

hypothetical tomato, originally uploaded by bloomgal64.

You might remember this tomato photo from a few weeks ago:

well, as you can see, someone painted a picture of it.

I feel so vaguely famous, all of a sudden….

My trip to Ouray was quite successful, even though it involved a lot of driving: five hours on Wednesday, and then the same amount (only more frantic and hurried, since I had to be back in time for a memorial service) on Friday. That is a bit excessive, given that it wasn’t that long of a trip, but it was worth it, anyway. The cabin my dad rented was fun (although the mattresses on the bunks had probably not seen a firm, supportive day in their lives), and Ouray and the surrounding area were green, given all of the recent rain. We did something I haven’t done much of before: we did a bunch of mountain driving between Ouray and Silverton, on roads (or “roads,” to be more specific) accessible only by Jeeps, ATVs and other vehicles with four-wheel drive.

Now, I’ve inherited from my dad the ethos that if you’re doing something outdoors in a vehicle, you’re not actually outdoors (bikes, of course, are exempt from this, since they’re, you know, bikes). Cars and trucks are just the tool you use to take you to a place that’s outdoors, rather than an activity in and of themselves. This idea also applies to other vehicles, like snowmobiles or motorcycles. So, motorized vehicle = not a proper outdoor activity. Anyway, we were using our motorized vehicle to go to old mining sites in the San Juans. The most spectacular one was the Sound Democrat Mill, an old mill that had been partically restored by the BLM, rebuilt just enough that you can move around in it without worrying about rotten boards, rusty nails, or other hazards, but decrepit enough that it still seems like a ruin. We also stopped at the top of a lot of 12,000-foot-plus passes, so that my dad could take photos for his future textbook, and so the dog could go graze on tundra greenery (he really likes to eat grass, enough so that I sometimes have a difficult time not thinking of it as “dog salad”). There were quite a few people out driving on these roads, though — a bunch of members of a California Jeep club, and approximately 80 jillion people on ATVs and motorcycles, who seemed to be going through the mountain valleys as fast as they could.

Ouray is one of those places in Colorado that seems to always remain the same. The hot-springs pool is still there, the old, handpainted “Switzerland of America” sign that you see as you drive up from the south is still extant, and the stores there remain a mix of t-shirt shops, candy stores, places to buy mineral specimens, and photo studios where you can get “Wild West” pictures taken. True, there are more coffee shops than there used to be, but the grocery store and variety store I remember going into as a kid (and my dad remembers going these places, too, when he grew up) are still there, and seem largely the same. This is remarkable, given the town’s proximity to Telluride and the changes that have beset many other Colorado mountain towns — rising property prices, displacement of locals by wealthy, out-of-state second-home buyers, things like that. The reasons I’ve heard for the relative stasis of Ouray is that there isn’t any great skiing nearby (although ice climbers descend on the place in the winter, but they’re hardly a wealthy, glamorous type) and it’s hard to get there in the winter, due to the difficulty of driving over mountain passes in the snow and ice. Although there are quite a few out-of-state plates to be seen parked downtown or driving though town, it’s a place that is still where Coloradans go to enjoy their own state.

I took a lot of photos while I was there — several of them can be found here. Some of my favorites, such as the picture of the columbine above, are included in this entry.

There are a lot of awesome vintage or retro cruiser bikes in downtown Durango. My bike would have been right at home, among its own kind. My favorite was the green Schwinn parked in front of a bank:

The historic Beaumont Hotel, in downtown Ouray:

A white-crowned sparrow, perched on a stick:

Green mountain vegetation, framed by abandoned mill machinery: